


Obedience

by MercuryGray



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Biblical References, Disapproving Family, F/M, Gen, Growing Up, Introspection, Leaving Home, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Parent-Child Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-24
Updated: 2017-02-24
Packaged: 2018-09-26 16:58:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9912362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: "Children, obey your parents in all things." Jane Green is giving serious thought to the small matter of obedient, and disobedient, children.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For the anon who asked on tumblr: "Jane Green's reflection on Emma and Henry's interactions in 2x03 and in 2x04, maybe how she notices an attraction between the two?"

Jane Green was giving much thought to Paul's letter to the Colossians.

 

She had always found great consolation in all of Paul's epistles (her new testament more heavily considered than her old) but Colossians was of special interest of late.

 

Of course, there was Paul's first injunction  _ Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands _ , which, she daily prayed, she followed to the best of her ability.

 

But more than that the line that followed:  _ Children, obey your parents in all things. _

 

War had a strange way of changing families - and as this war had gone on, she had seen more change in her children than she had ever thought possible. Before all of this Jane Green would have happily admitted that she was mother to three of the best, brightest and most obedient young people on God's green earth  -- but the events of the past several months were making her question that such a statement had ever been true.

 

It had started with Jimmy  -- all his talk of joining the army when anyone with sense could see he was not fit for such service, with his foot as it was. All this military fervor - where would it lead? After him Emma and Alice both, berating their father when his actions did not seem as patriotic as they felt they should be, and then, finally, Emma alone, going off to the hospital to be...of comfort, or some such nonsense.

 

She had forbidden it, at first, knowing, in her heart of hearts as she looked at her eldest daughter's determined brow that Emma would disobey. And of course she was proved right. Despite all of her mother's  prohibitions, despite every argument she could manage and every objection she could raise, Emma had gone to Mansion House.  And it had changed her.

 

There was the fear, of course, that a well-bred girl had no place among coarse men, made wild and indecent by months of living away from the wholesome influences of their wives and mothers, and the certain knowledge that her natural innocence would be spoiled by such work - not to mention the delicate skin of her hands and the natural shine of her hair. Fear also, that in addition to the hardness of the work and the men, there was still the matter of the surgeons to contend with, educated men with leering, lecherous eyes who also had not the consolations of their wives and sweethearts and might take the presence of a young and pretty girl among them as an invitation to ...certain liberties.

 

But it was none of these changes or abuses that Jane saw in her daughter. The growing presence of a certain obstinacy, perhaps, but that had been there before. But perhaps that was what was changing. It was not a child's petulance, nor the blind stubbornness of youth denied, but...something different, now, decided and considered, tempered with patience, as if in each matter on which she held firm she had given clear, studied thought. 

 

_ My daughter is growing up, _ Jane Green realized.  _ And there is no evil in that. _

 

She would have preferred a different classroom for her Emma, but her teachers in this new kind of womanhood, at least, were good ones -- the abolitionist Miss Phinney was measured in her emotions, firm in her convictions. Miss Anne Hastings she could do without, her morals being somewhat indiscriminate in color, but the woman was possessed of a certain professionalism and pride in her work. The Matron, Brannan, was also not perhaps of the most desired stock but her authority and the way in which she used it would stand a growing girl in good stead.

 

Emma had taken her first trip only to look for her beau, but she returned for a different purpose, greater than herself - first the nursing of the Confederate boys, and then a larger sphere, her reach extending into the hospital, her skills not just that of an enthusiastic amateur but something else, something more. Yes, Jane Green had watched her daughter of an evening with a medical text in hand and pencil at the ready, delicately taking notes on some point of anatomy she wished to learn further, burning a midnight candle reading in some medical journal of a new treatment she thought would be of some benefit to one poor soul or another. She’d listened for Emma late at night when she returned from a long day, locking the door behind herself and silently going up to bed, only to rise early the next morning to return to the same -- this from a girl who sometimes could not have been persuaded to rise from bed until nine!

 

There was an uneasy balance to be kept here, between pride and praise, sanction and opposition. It did not do to give any indication that a mother could, on further study, change her mind. But there were opportunities enough for little reconciliations - a question asked at dinner over a soldier’s expected recovery, an offer for a new apron or a supply of fruit for the boys, a compliment repeated where her daughter could hear. 

 

Small approvals, given at interval - and larger ones, too, when occasion warranted. When Emma sent word that there was need, at the hospital, for a preacher of Secessionist sympathies there was no question but that she would help. She turned herself quickly to the task at hand, dispatching a slave to Reverend Burwell's house, and then, her motherly instincts raised, set to assembling the tools for her own good works. Let her daughter see her mother was not without her own methods of consolation. Science and medicine had their places, true, but there was no match for the soothing hand and even voice of a mother.

 

How changed she found her husband’s Mansion House! A lady had no place in such an institution, she’d often said, and coming back for the first time in months she saw how true it was. Her lovely, gentle daughter, working every day in a place like this? She hardly recognized it - or the woman her daughter was while she was there. This was a different Emma than the one that left their house every morning - more self-assured, confident in her ability and her use - and more open in her new-found opinions, it would seem.

 

“Mother, by what right are wounded men shamed for what they believe in?”

 

_ Children, be obedient to your parents. _ Was that so hard?

 

But even in the midst of her anger, even as she berated her daughter for abandoning her family and her dear-fought beliefs, Jane Green saw something she had not seen before, something she had never guessed at in her wildest dreams. As her daughter sheltered behind the Reverend Hopkins, and looked to him for guidance, and waited on his words with shy eyes, the vision came, and it amazed her.

When she'd let Emma go to the hospital she'd been afraid of the surgeons and their corruptions - she never dreamed she'd have the chaplain to consider.

 

What she knew of this Henry Hopkins was slight, at best - Emma spoke little of him, her repetitions at the dinner table filled more often with the other nurses (Miss Phinney in particular) and the surgeons.  She knew now from their brief argument at the bedside of Corporal Bryant that he was of abolitionist tendencies, and that he could quote his scripture well, and with great feeling, not one of your sneaking, cowardly scholars who could only study and not preach. 

 

But she knew also from Mrs. Fairfax that it had been he who had delivered the body of her dear Tom from the hospital, and sat with her a hour and let her cry, and spoke to her in earnest, heartfelt sympathy of the boy he'd known, had tried to befriend. (She knew he'd come to the funeral, too - and hadn't he walked beside Emma then?) "In her grief is found our purpose," he had said at Corporal Bryant's bedside, the anger in his voice made hastily over into calm. "To comfort, not to confront." They were words he lived, it seemed.

 

And she knew her daughter looked at him with expectation in her eyes. And he? Did he look back at her the same? She had not seen his face. She could not say.

 

Well, but Emma had set her sights on worse. 

 

Jane Green had approved of Frank Stringfellow because his family was good - nothing more. That he was brash, risk-taking, and an accomplished flirt had also not escaped her notice over the years, but she had held those in reserve, thinking that age, and perhaps the war, would form him up a bit and cast those things away. What he was like now she did not know - but maybe a changed Frank was not quite what a changed Emma now desired.

 

Further intelligence would be required - and not from her dining room. No, she would observe her newfound daughter in amongst her newfound people - she would go and watch her at the hospital again - if she could be found. The wards were searched, inquiries were made, flippancies answered. (Rebel nurse, indeed. Well, but Jane Green had some flippancy in her to answer back with.) Where was her daughter? Gone to accompany the Chaplain. 

 

Accompany? Accompany? And what meaning had that word, of the thousands it could signify? Accompany to the vagabonds of the streets on a mission of mercy or...or on a lover’s stroll - or one disguised as the other? Accompany? What sort of word was that?

 

The kind that meant her daughter did not come home that night, apparently, which meant that Jane was obliged to go back the next day, nerves worn to a thread, demanding of the matron, of the head nurse, of the very head of the hospital himself where her daughter was to be found and, if still lost, what they were doing to find her and bring her back.

 

She was dismissed for weightier matters as a corpsman ran in, shouting for the major’s attention - a wagon-train of wounded had arrived. She composed herself a moment, planning her next attack, what she would tell her husband that would move him to the action she desired. She would return - this retreat was but tactical, and temporary.

The madhouse of the entry would have to be braved again, this time abuzz with activity, the hive swarming around the fallen comrades in the street, busy bees tending to their wounded. And it was here she found her daughter. 

The Emma of earlier days would have been missing on some slim pretext, gone without a note for something foolish. But there was no foolishness here - only wounded men, and her daughter to tend them, as calm and capable as if she had been doing this all her life. Jane Green looked around at the bloody-headed and bandaged and begged forgiveness for her assumptions. This had been no lovers stroll - no, nothing like.

She is but a child, she’d scolded the major.   _ But when I became a man, _ Paul wrote in Corinthians,  _ I put away childish things. _

 

_ For now we see through a glass, darkly,  _ Paul went on.  _ But then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.  _ ****

Light, and darkness, truth and falsehood, knowledge and innocence. Were these choices a person made, or conditions imposed by circumstance? Which brought her back again into to Colossians, and the question of obedience.  Her husband found out of Emma’s adventures soon enough, and there was little enough she could do to stem his anger in that moment, except to defend her daughter, to say that she had not been alone, that she was with a man of god, that she had returned safely and that was all that mattered.

 

She did not know if Emma heard the approval in her voice, or saw the understanding in her eyes. 

 

The next morning she was gone, and her mother was in the parlor, re-reading the letters of Paul once more.

 

**Author's Note:**

> God bless Donna Murphy's acting; she gives so much to think about in a few wordless glances in some of the scenes referenced. To whoever gave this prompt, thank you - this was really fun to tease apart and play around in for a few days. Jane's only got bits and pieces of the story -- she doesn't know about Emma and Henry's kiss (and the aftermath) but I think, from the little we see of her that she approves of her daughter's growing strength of character.
> 
> Several commentators joked on Tumblr that they think Jane's an Emma/Henry shipper, and I'm not sure I'd go so far just yet, but I think she could get there. She just needs to see Henry make more respectful heart-eyes at her daughter.


End file.
